In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependency on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane’s formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks earlier.

In the popular mind, which is arguably more heavily influenced by myth, fiction, and propaganda than by science (especially something as esoteric as chaos theory), the butterfly effect is often understood as a minor disturbance to a timeline resulting in a substantial divergence downstream. It’s an alteration from one likelihood or expectation to another one, typically carrying major impacts. We have no trouble believing in fates and destinies being fundamentally altered by arbitrary choices and happenstances. Hindsight sometimes even affords the opportunity to wonder what might have happened if one had zigged instead of zagged, knowing that every instant has the unbeknowst potential for a life-changing development. (What bus?) The foresight to recognize those linchpin moments escapes us most of the time, but we believe in them nonetheless.

My reason for bringing this up is to make the observation that with the biosphere now manifesting major impacts that are highly discontinuous from the historical record, we don’t really believe in the butterfly effect, or at least ignore/deny it. Minor perturbances, from population pressure to pollution to paving to purported prosperity, are frequently thought to be too tiny to affect something as large as the planet and its finely tuned systems. Yet ripples and eddies have accumulated over time and are now lapping shores like tsunamis, causing the face of the Earth to be quite different from its state, say, 250 years ago, before the fossil fuels era kicked off in earnest.

This week’s biggest news is a good case in point: an artic vortex has brought dangerously low temperatures and wind chills to North America. This phenonenon, where the mass of extremely cold air slides off its normal center at the North Pole, may not be entirely unknown in modern history, but its reappearance this week reminds us that small changes to the systems of the Earth’s thermal regulation can wreak substantial havok. (Please stop reporting the damage in terms of cost in dollars!) Further, in answer to the question, “Are these cold temps due to climate change?” at least this article at Common Dreams answers unequivocally “yes.” It argues that all weather events major and minor are now attributable to climate change because, like the fate or destiny aspect of the butterfly effect, we have embarked on a new timeline that diverges from a calmer, steadier state we might have enjoyed had we not made unwitting, wholesale alterations to the Earth’s climate systems. This is essentially the same argument made by Bill McKibben in The End of Nature way back in 1989, namely, that Nature (capital N) didn’t really exist anymore because humanity’s imprint is now everywhere: in the air, water, and soil. (Incidentally, this is the book that awakened me to ecological issues that in the ensuing 25 years have only grown progressively gloomier and doomier.) Put another way for the entertainment-bred masses, we now have the equivalent of J.J. Abrahm’s reboot of Star Trek TOS with a new timeline, offering the opportunity to depart from canon as desired. The major difference is that, in our reality, we can only project and extrapolate how it would have been had we not messed everything up — except to say that it wouldn’t have been, well, nearly so messed up.

From my home and workplace in Chicago, it’s been curious to see how people have responded to the extreme cold. Fashion has been displaced in favor of function, with men and women on the street mummified under multiple layers to the point they look like the Michelin Man. Traffic (air, train, bus, automobiles) has not ground to a complete halt but it’s been slowed to a crawl, with many cancellations, delays, and accidents. The huddled masses (read: the homeless and unhoused) are congregating unapologeticaly in warming locations (public buildings such as libraries, underground pedways, on public transportation, etc.) to avoid the very real threat of freezing to death. Nonetheless, several freezing deaths have already been reported. School and business closures kept many at home, with many others calling in to complain of their inability to get to work. Four days of snow just prior to the extreme cold snap has everything covered in snow and ice, and plumes of water vapor behind every vehicle and over every building testify to the ongoing maintenance of an inside/outside temperature delta of 80+ deg. F. In addition, everything is encrusted in salt, which inevitably gets tracked indoors.

The look and feel of this experience may not yet be apocalyptic, but the sense of hunkering down to endure, if not survive, is palpable. Most individuals are cooperative and aware of others facing the same difficulties, but there are always a few douchebags arguing and pushing their way forward as though no one else matters. Such idiots turn out to be yet another part of the entire package to be tolerated, though my suspicion is that worsening conditions in repeat events will eventually lead to intolerance, violence, and mayhem. It’s a sneak peek, perhaps, of what many of us expect when collapse of services and utilities, financial institutions, and infrastructure impacts all of us directly, like the weather is impacting us this week.

86 thoughts on “Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings”

The remarkable Arctic cold blast that brought dangerously cold wind chills of -30°F or lower to at least nineteen states is winding down today. Tuesday’s high temperature in Detroit struggled to just -1°F. It was just the fourth time in recorded history that the high temperature had failed to reach zero. In Buffalo, New York, Tuesday’s epic lake effect blizzard dumped 12.6″ of snow on the city, with up to 25″ falling in nearby regions. Another 2 – 3″ are expected on Wednesday as the winds over Lake Erie wind down and temperatures warm up. Temperatures will moderate to levels about 10 – 20° below normal on Wednesday, in contrast to the 20 – 40° below normal temperatures commonly observed on Monday and Tuesday over large portions of the eastern half of the United States. By Friday, the majority of the U.S. will see above normal temperatures, and by Saturday, high temperatures will be up to 40°F warmer than Tuesday’s highs over much of the Midwest.

Figure 1. Arctic air flowing over the Lake Erie on January 7, 2014 created two major bands of lake-effect snow snow near Buffalo, New York. Image credit: NASA.

Not a Historic Cold Wave
As notable as this week’s cold wave was–bringing the coldest air seen since 1996 or 1994 over much of the nation–the event failed to set any monthly or all-time record low minimum temperature records at airports and cooperative observing stations monitored by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. As wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt summed it up for me, “The only significant thing about the cold wave is how long it has been since a cold wave of this force has hit for some portions of the country–18 years, to be specific. Prior to 1996, cold waves of this intensity occurred pretty much every 5-10 years. In the 19th century, they occurred every year or two (since 1835). Something that, unlike the cold wave, is a truly unprecedented dry spell in California and Oregon, which is causing unprecedented winter wildfires in Northern California.“ Part of the reason that this week’s cold wave did not set any all-time or monthly cold records is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so in a warming climate. As Andrew Freedman of Climate Central wrote in a blog post yesterday, “While the cold temperatures have been unusual and even deadly, climate data shows that intense cold such as this event is now occurring far less frequently in the continental U.S. than it used to. This is largely related to winter warming trends due to man-made global warming and natural climate variability.” For example, in Detroit during the 1970s, there were an average of 7.9 nights with temperatures below zero. But this decade, that number has been closer to two nights.

Figure 3. Trend in frigid nights in Detoit from the 1970s to the most recent decade. Yellow line indicates linear trend since 1970. Image credit: Andrew Freedman, Climate Central

We have no idea what’s coming down the pipe, but if Haiyan is any indication, it’s way worse than we can imagine (since none of us have ever seen storms like this). And apparently tornadoes can happen at any time and any place now.

Now chances are it’ll continue on the trajectory indicated by the graph, but you notice the wild fluctuation of actual readings on any given year. If we start becoming the tropics where we rarely see cold nights, we’re going to have bug problems, disease problems, and others.

First Butterfly – an early hominid swings a stick at a butterfly and bashes the skull of competing hominid.

Last Butterfly – giant diaphanous geoengineered butterfly positioned in space between sun and earth. Last seen in tow of a UFO, souvenir from a planet overrun by neoplasmic growth.

What butterflies should we be hatching now? Metazoans have macrophages and natural killer cells to destroy cancer cells. What types of human peptides should the human equivalent be taught to recognize? Mercedes emblems, golf shoes, cigars, Gucci loafers, chauffeur driven limousines? These are simply ape status symbols and there are billions of apes that would love a chance to display them. There really is no capitalist “them” that we can disparage or eliminate to solve our problems. Them is us and we love to design and refine tools to be used against the ecosystem.

For every little butterfly trying to create a vortex of change, there are several thousand beating their wings furiously to achieve a lemming-like finality to their existence. We like being a cancer, it pays immediate dividends in comfort and pleasure even thought the build-up of toxins will overwhelm us in the end. Not only will we not stop using fossil fuels, we will use them up and then use even more toxic nuclear to shelter us from the unbearable hothouse we’ve created. Scientists will be harangued and hanged.

Nuclear plants produce a lot of waste heat and use a lot of water. Many are located inland on rivers. In our newly butterflied climate, how many of these rivers will run dry or how many will provide adequate cooling when the air temperature is 48C with 95% humidity. An alternative is to place them on the oceans and we’ve seen what can happen there. We didn’t need the Pacific Ocean anyway. Of course a hypothetical thorium reactor in every backyard is a grand idea. Once they’re deployed we’ll reset the garden of Eden where everyone gets plenty of rain, lawns are green and the reactor never overflows.

A Chernobyl Liquidator wearing a heavy lead protection vest and gas mask pushes a baby found abandoned while measuring radiation levels inside the Exclusion Zone, in the village of Tatsenki days after the meltdown.
[Via NatGeo]

…Disruptions of the polar vortex have been predicted by climate scientists such as Dr. Jennifer Francis, Dr. James Hansen, and Dr. Jeff Masters, among others, who have warned of more extreme weather caused by, among other things, loss of polar sea ice. Dr. Hansen, in particular, has warned of very intense storms as Arctic melt continues to ramp up and more of the Arctic’s cold is pushed episodically southward where it will inevitably confront the warm temperate and tropical zones. In the end, Hansen warns of frontal systems packing the strength of hurricanes large enough to span entire continents. These are the powerful effects of continued Arctic warming and of which the current polar vortex collapse is but a symptom….

The butterfly effect is very interesting but is nowhere as interesting as The Elephant Effect.

The presence of an elephant in any legislative chamber causes lawmakers to immediately become blind and deaf. Even a herd of elephants charging around, demolishing the furniture and trampling people to death still causes lawmakers to become blind and deaf, and to remain that way.

“Blasting, billowing, bursting forth
With the power of ten billion butterfly sneezes
Man with his flaming pyre
Has conquered the wayward breezes
Climbing to tranquility
Far above the cloud
Conceiving the heavens
Clear of misty shroud”

The Moody Blues

and another

“How is it we are here, on this path we walk,
In this world of pointless fear, filled with empty talk,
Descending from the apes as scientist-priests all think,
Will they save us in the end, we’re trembling on the brink.

Men’s mighty mine-machines digging in the ground,
Stealing rare minerals where they can be found.
Concrete caves with iron doors, bury it again,
While a starving frightened world fills the sea with grain.

Her love is like a fire burning inside,
Her love is so much higher it can’t be denied,
She sends us her glory, it’s always been there,
Her love’s all around us, it’s there for you and me to share.”

A major new study in Nature finds “our climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than most previous estimates.”
The result, lead author Steven Sherwood told me, is that on our current emissions path we are headed toward a “most-likely warming of roughly 5°C [9°F] above modern [i.e. current] temperatures or 6°C [11°F] above preindustrial” temperatures this century.
This finding is consistent with paleoclimate data (see “Last Time CO2 Levels Hit 400 Parts Per Million The Arctic Was 14°F Warmer!”). Also, this study is consistent with other recent observation-based analyses (see “Observations Support Predictions Of Extreme Warming And Worse Droughts This Century”).http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/08/3120061/nature-high-climate-sensitivity/

One hundred thousand bats dead in Queensland from heat. Canary in the coal mine. New Nature study (see Getty link above) indicates greater climate sensitivity to CO2 levels. Greater near-surface evaporation and circulation will actually diminish higher cloud formation, critical for reflectance of incoming solar radiation. Previous models left upper level cloud formation unchanged. Ten degrees F by 2100. I suppose my mid-latitude location will have average summer temperatures near 95 F with plenty of days above 110 F. I imagine some mid-continent areas like Oklahoma and Texas will see long summer periods above 120 F. Monsanto must be working “feverishly” to develop heat resistant crops. I was thinking that there might be a problem providing electricity to all of those air conditioners, but my model du jour now includes the inundation of most coastal areas with a sea breeze of methane and hydrogen sulfide which should reduce demand substantially.

As many in North America are learning, the health of the arctic affects weather in warmer, southern parts of the continent. Mark Fischetti does a great job explaining the “polar vortex” and how the belt that essentially keeps cold air tucked away up in the arctic is loosening, resulting in the historic and extreme cold snap we’ve all been tweeting about:

The polar vortex is a prevailing wind pattern that circles the Arctic, flowing from west to east all the way around the Earth. It normally keeps extremely cold air bottled up toward the North Pole. Occasionally, though, the vortex weakens, allowing the cold air to pour down across Canada into the U.S., or down into other regions such Eastern Europe. In addition to bringing cold, the air mass can push the jet stream—the band of wind that typically flows from the Pacific Ocean across the U.S.—much further south as well. If the jet stream puts up a fight, the moisture it carries can fall out as heavy snow, which atmospheric scientists say is the circumstance that caused the February 2010 “snowmageddon” storm that shut down Washington, D.C.

But we’ve seen that the jet stream isn’t putting up as much of a fight lately. The reason, is that arctic sea ice is melting. Another factor is the role of snow in reflecting sunlight back to the atmosphere and strengthens the jet stream. As with sea ice, snow cover has been declining. NASA’s Earth Observatory illustrates how snow cover is changing…

Even he is softpedalling the crisis. If you can’t grow food and the plants and animals have no time to adapt, what makes Keeling think humans will be able to adapt to such catastrophic changes? Humans have shown themselves to be suicidally committed to maintaining the capitalist industrial civilization that is destroying the habitability of Earth. It’s too late to avoid the wall we’re racing towards at a speed equivalent in geological time to a lightning strike.

Very nice work. An in your face refutation of the capitalist wolf in green sheep’s clothing approach to business as usual. In truth, we were ideally adapted to our environment before we picked up tools and started our unnatural pattern of growth. Now we’re just a big technological hurricane smashing through ecosystems with our ignited fossil fuels, creating damage and entropy wherever we go. The hurricane derives structure and motion from the heat differential between warm water and the cold upper atmosphere. Human civilization maintains structure and motion by burning fossil fuels and dumping its heat into the atmosphere. The hurricane will dissipate when the heat source is exhausted or no longer available. Likewise, human civilization will dissipate when the heat source is removed. Both evolve to take advantage of disequilibrium. Long lasting structures like the ecosystem cannot exhaust their energy source, the sun, and therefor are long-lasting and able to reach great levels of complexity. There is an occasional volcanic eruption or asteroid that can knock life back, but the fact that life cannot bring the sun into equilibrium cannot be underestimated in importance to maintaining structure and complexity. Dissipative structures don’t form automatically just because there’s a disequilibrium, conditions must be pacific enough to allow the equilibrating mechanism to get established. Once it is established and grows in size and strength it may be relatively unalterable as long as sufficient energy is available.

Malignant tumors find the bodies they inhabit very useful in providing energy that can be used to grow new structure through cell division and angiogenesis so that additional glucose may be distributed to hungry cells and waste eliminated, including moving waste heat into the general circulation. Like a cancer we’re fulfilling our entropy producing mandate, but unfortunately it will likely terminate our very long and stable tenure on this planet.

Beautifully stated, but to be clear, the cancer is capitalism and not humans per se.

“…when human beings only deal with each other on the basis of money we get all the horrors of blood, whips and guns that humans employ against each other in order to obtain and control more and more money (slavery, colonialism, imperialism, fraud– you name it). It is not humans per se, of course, who engage in these horrors, but a special class of humans (capitalists) created by the dominant economic system of monopoly capitalism…”
~ Thomas Riggins

Tumors or cancer lines are subject to selection. Capitalism is simply the most aggressive and metastatic variety. Banks do act as cancer promoters, funding any collection of tools and people that may reap a reward from the environment. But even if the capitalist system were eliminated people would still employ tools and information to extract resources from the environment, although much less effectively. Even Homo erectus was a precancerous lesion. The expansion and development of this cancer have been progressing for a very long time. Cancer elicits a visceral, emotional reaction from humans as we are susceptible to the same disease that we have become. There certainly are differences between cellular scale cancers and the human industrial variety, but our manner of emergence and our behavior place us squarely in a systems chapter entitled “Malignancies”.

Interesting way of looking at it; nonetheless, I don’t see humans as cancer. For mankind to even have a chance at survival with alternative ways of living, he must first acknowledge that the current system, i.e. capitalist industrial civilization, is terminal. Ingrained into our thinking and accepted as common sense over hundreds of years, capitalism is an extremely virulent and mutagenic ideology. We can realistically say that it has become more of a death cult than a religion.

“the new ambition of the Renaissance man, which is ―the
transubstantiation of all nature into unique substance… [the] ambition to exorcise the
natural substance of a thing in order to substitute a synthetic core”

A couple of graphs of interest to confirm what you already know:Graph source: Scott, J.M. 2008. Threats to Biological Diversity: Global, Continental, Local. U.S. Geological Survey, Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife, Research Unit, University Of Idaho.

Canada confirms fatal case of H5N1 avian flu in Alberta: first in North America

January 9, 2014 – CANADA – Health officials say a Canadian has died of H5N1, also known as the avian flu, in the first-known case in North America. Health Minister Rona Ambrose announced on Wednesday that a Canadian who recently returned from a trip to Beijing died in an Alberta hospital earlier this month. On Tuesday, the cause was confirmed to be avian flu. “The health system did everything it could for this individual, and our thoughts are with the family at this time,” Ambrose told a press conference. The World Health Organization considers H5N1 to be a highly infectious, severe respiratory disease in birds which is rarely transmitted to humans. The mortality rate, however, is high. About 60 per cent of those who contract the avian flu ultimately die from the disease. To date, there have been 648 cases of H5N1 in humans from 15 different countries. Of those, 384 have been fatal. Last year, there were 38 confirmed cases of H5N1 and 24 deaths. Until now, there have been no confirmed cases in North America. Several cases have recently been reported in China and other Asian nations, although not specifically near Beijing. Officials confirmed that the deceased returned from a flight from Beijing showing symptoms. The person was treated in hospital and passed away on Jan. 3. The cause of death was confirmed by the National Microbiology Laboratory on Tuesday. There has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission, and doctors say the victim’s family is showing no signs of illness. Officials believe this is a standalone case. “This is a very rare and isolated case.

Avian influenza is not easily transmitted from person to person. It is not the same virus that is currently present in seasonal influenza in Alberta,” said Dr. James Talbot, chief medical officer of health for Alberta Health. “Public health has followed up with all close contacts of this individual and offered Tamiflu as a precaution. None of them have symptoms and the risk of developing symptoms is extremely low. Precautions for health care staff were also taken as part of this individual’s hospital treatment. “I expect that with the rarity of transmission and the additional precautions taken, there will be no more cases in Alberta.” Health officials say the chances of human-to-human transmission are extremely low. Still, they plan on contacting those who were on the same airplane as the deceased to offer assurances. The deceased was on a flight from Beijing to Edmonton on Dec. 27, with a brief stopover in Vancouver. Dr. Talbot told a news conference that H5N1 has never been transmitted between passengers onboard an airplane. Public officials would not confirm any information about the identity of the deceased as a point of confidentiality, beyond the fact that he or she was Albertan and died in a hospital somewhere in the province. It is unclear how the deceased contracted H5N1; it is not believed that they visited any bird farms during their time in China. The Public Health Agency of Canada is not recommending any travel advisories, but do caution visitors to China to avoid high-risk areas such as poultry farms and animal markets. Visitors should also avoid contact with birds and ensure eggs and poultry they eat are well cooked.

[how long before it mutates and does easily transmit from person to person . . .]

Simple stupidity goes like this: “We’ve had some very cold weather, therefore the Earth is cooling.”

Complex stupidity goes like this: “If I don’t protect the vested interest groups who sponsor my political career I will lose my position at the feeding trough.”

Complex stupidity is far more dangerous, of course, because a person engaged in complex stupidity cannot be persuaded to change their stance, whereas a person suffering from simple stupidity would say: “We’ve had a lot of very hot weather lately so the Earth must be warming.”

I watched a BBC doc on Metamorphosis this week, a brief nature porn fix when I need a break from the regular doom and gloom I watch and read. What struck me was the explicit description of some metamorphosing species as open systems in a dynamic relationship with their environment, and that triggers for metamorphosis were due to intelligent processing of information about resources/predators/climate that individuals and/or groups used to shape the timing of their own transformations. Metamorphosis isn’t just change in form either, its a change in a way of life and provides opportunities that increase chances for mobility, access to food, new environments, and reproduction.

Without getting into more lame blather about intelligence (what is it? who decides?) or machine metaphors about instinct or more faith based assertions about human specialness, I find it impossible not to ask myself: what sorts of adaptations, transformations, metamorphoses in the broader sense did human beings make in response to intelligent processing of information they obtained in real time from their environment? Back before there was nature, just us living as part of the world all around us? All those generations in Deep Time before civilization and hierarchy and religion?

Within historic time there are plenty of records of strategies different societies took when faced with the constantly unpredictable flux in the world around them. The Holocene may have been incredibly stable compared to the norm of climate variation in Deep Time, but even so there is/was always variability from year to year. I find it extremely unlikely that we, as the frighteningly adaptive species that we are, are somehow more fundamentally stupid than tadpoles or locusts when it comes to making adaptive decisions as we move along our own genetically constrained pathway through life.

Unpredictable changes meant hedging your bets, getting along, minimizing excessive risks, avoiding too much of anything, a sort of moderation in all things. As Boehm points out, it was a hierarchy of the many, bands of friends and allies built up over time using gifts and reciprocal commitments and obligations, that held the potential for coercive power. Chiefs were merely those who displayed the most social intelligence and were accorded more respect, not power over others. All members of the group were very aware of the corrosive social impact of envy, exceptional ability, and individual ambition and had explicit strategies for minimizing their effects and avoiding meritocracy. (Even today hunters among certain groups exchange arrows so that nobody knows whose shot actually killed the beast that is brought down. And bragging just isn’t done.) These strategies did not include romantic appeals to ‘just be a good person’. Breaking the rules in a society that lived on gossip and where privacy was all but nonexistent could lead to social shaming and even exile or death (pretty much the same thing).

It wasn’t at all a case of everybody wanting to be A Big Man to get the harem of babes and pump out progeny. We aren’t chimps or baboons. I doubt population explosions ever made sense to people who were always all too aware of the requirements and costs of having helpless children for long periods of time. Even on a planet of abundance beyond anything we today can imagine, when smart capable hunter gatherers could remove themselves as small groups whenever they chose to take a break from the larger group and avoid conflict yet still find food and shelter and security enough to reproduce, there have always been limits. Social ties of reciprocal obligations and gift giving still linked people who chose to live apart due to serious disagreements. Exit was always available, but not necessarily permanent or overly risky. (Imagine that kind of freedom, something those of us imprisoned in capitalism will never know, even if we manage to run off to a permaculture homestead and keep its worst aspects just out of sight once in a while.)

Even if its true they had amounts of leisure time we can only fantasize about now, full of dancing and singing and screwing while taking hallucinogenic drugs, these were people who probably never got bored, overly introspective, depressed, or suffered from lack of meaning and purpose or existential angst because real life demanded an immense amount of attention, knowledge, wisdom in decision making, flexibility and competence, and just hard work. I seriously doubt they were the dirty miserable fearful caricatures they are often portrayed as on ‘nature’ TV, obsessed with food and shelter and endlessly wandering a hostile world and ever so eager to settle down and start agriculture (and slavery, endless tedious toil in the fields, life in claustrophobic proximity to animals and their diseases, a low variety bland diet, ruled over by others etc.).

They were probably awake in ways most of us get only a few times a year, unless we are rich enough to take adventure trips or engage in high tech risky sports on a regular basis. They had to be. And just as many of us today find joy in paying attention to and studying plants, animals, features of the landscape, clouds and weather, stars and the night sky, or even hunting and tracking, wouldn’t they have felt this type of satisfaction even more, given they knew their world so much better than the vast majority of us urban types ever will? Their world seems like a positive feedback cycle that promotes competence, a sense of efficacious agency, meaning and purpose, and all the chemical highs that accompany our experience of those states of being.

Doesn’t this all suggest the very opposite of mindless relentless cancerous growth and careless fowling of nests and homes? Modern humans enmeshed in an inescapable capitalist world system are insane and are a cancer, its hard not to agree with this characterization. Maybe we really are dumber than yeast. Now. But I don’t think that is some essential and genetically determined characteristic; I think it is learned and is the dark side of being so fucking adaptable. We would have been far better off if certain social mutations led to local extinctions long ago, and quickly, whenever they popped up.

Eloquently stated. I agree with your final conclusion that our omnicidal culture does not come from some “essential and genetically determined characteristic.” As Kevin Moore and others have pointed out, there actually are large-scale options out there that humans could take as a species. However, I think the ideology of capitalist industrial civilization has such a stranglehold on the planet that alternative avenues have all but been shut down.

The Northern worker has internalized the ideology of capitalist industrial regimentation, turning himself into another part of the market mechanism: “the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.”
~ Thoreau

STRANGLEHOLD, the very word I used a decade ago to describe the vice-like grip capitalism has on western societies. At the time I was naïve enough to think the stranglehold could be broken. Now I recognise that in most cases it cannot.

Nevertheless, I continue to do battle. What else, other than seeking and promulgating truth and attempting to reduce present and future suffering, can give life meaning?

TALOA, There Are Lots Of Alternatives. But the alternatives do not provide money for nothing to bankers and opportunists, so they ‘have to be’ stamped out.

Late in life I discover that people through the ages have fought the same battles we do, and most of the time they lost because money rules. it buys land. It buys weapons. It buys minds. It buys souls.

I largely agree, Eric. It seems that the reason agricultural societies were ‘successful’ is that they allowed rapid population growth of ‘captured’ minds and bodies.

Once religious and legal systems were established to maintain extreme hierarchy it was more or less impossible to escape. Runaway slaves were pursed, captured, punished and returned to work, or killed in a painful manner to threaten other potential runaways.

I agree that most of the stupidity we now witness is learned. Children learn stupidity from adults around them, and are trained to conform and behave stupidly by the ‘education’ system. it took me a long time to unlearn the crap imposed on me by the system.

The problem all of us who are not enmeshed in the insane, cancerous system have is to reach those trapped in the web of deceit. Most of them defend the system that has captured them because it provides them with trinkets (for the moment). .

We’ve metamorphosed into something toxic, both to ourselves and to the planet. Pity our diseased transformation just kills us so slowly while allowing so much reproduction and temporary health and growth. It’s spooky how like cancer we’ve really become, robust florid growth before the end.

What seems truly tragic to me is that I really think this was arbitrary and due to chance, not inevitable, at least not until a certain point where exit to something else was no longer an option. Adaptation under coercion provided near term survival as agriculture and civilization enclosed the world, even before industrial capitalism, but there has always been resistance. There always seemed to be a way out and a place to run, or at least less hideous options.

If people can manage to live through a death camp (and as its been pointed out it ‘wasn’t the best’ who did so), hunter gatherers probably chose misery over immediate extinction when the choice was that stark. Maybe the best and bravest and wisest resisted until the end, but it didn’t do much good to those who came later. We are the fucked up descendants of all that adaptation. We are insane and we are trapped and our possibilities for exit are likely nonexistent. Plus, we are so far removed from our own long history, the meaningful life that would have made giving it up for trinkets seem completely ludicrous and ridiculous (not all so called primitives even in historic times immediately fell sway to beads and mirrors), we have to invent and imagine what it would have been like, rather than know from personal experience or elders or whatever. We often have to act on faith in something invented as we imagine other options, instead of on something more concrete connected to our own histories. Even those of us who have a sense of our terminal illness are still sick, how could we not be? We’ve never known anything else, we’re practically infected from birth. The scary types who adapt and even thrive in this insane system are the ‘successful’ ones. But it won’t give them survival benefit in the end, we’ll all go down together, guilty and slightly less guilty.

What if the alien sociologists who’ve been observing us over the eons could actually point out that moment in time when the social mutations took place in one small group, the ones that would eventually–through luck and toughness and of course violence–end up infecting the whole species? If they spoke through a human prophet to us in order to share their insight and analysis, would we really want to know? Would it make it easier to bear our coming extinction? Would they tell us that other options and outcomes, ones that were more in line with all the unique and successful qualities we pat ourselves on the back for, were so very possible, the 99 roads not taken instead of the one we ended up on? Civilization even, of kinds based on metamorphosis that recognized the primacy of our place in the bigger system? Guided and conscious social/biological evolution that truly minimized over generations the potential dangers in our nature: the pre-cancer cells of sociopathic individualism, ambition, greed, dishonesty, betrayal, treachery, manipulation, and hubris?

Utopia may have been possible, even likely, to the aliens with a view of our long history and a much better understanding of who we are. Look at all the beautiful things we can find to admire in even the most materially ‘poor’ cultures we know of or can still observe, human things that have nothing to do with architecture or literature or the other achievements of civilization (the ones I use to minimize my own insanity and I’m grateful for them, I couldn’t live without books). I don’t doubt we would find so very much to envy in the lives and societies of our early ancestors, the ones who were less insane and enslaved and lived naked in the woods.

As recently as last century, Marxism(s) provided something that inspired millions of people to sacrifice everything, in action and in solidarity, even if it was perhaps just a different version of a lot of the same industrial insanity. At least it was based on a recognition of our nature as social obligates, and spoke to something far deeper than individual greed for objects and entertainments. Yeah, many of the revolutions were hijacked by sociopathic elites who would have done quite well if they were born in the West, but who knows what someone like Allende could have accomplished? When I get really down I read The Communist Manifesto again, its so moving, what a picture of Something Better it provides even now, sigh…

Today we have nothing but toys and pills and access to porn. What we’ve created with our massive destruction of everything is so hideous and embarrassing, the aliens must be shocked and appalled. I really wish they existed and had sent Keanu Reeves to destroy us (and made him invulnerable to annoying little boys lol) before we killed the planet. In a recent conversation I had with my rich brother in law, who is as high on Hopium as anybody alive, I asked him what exactly he saw as long term meaningfully positive, in terms of values, purposeful activity, artifacts, achievements, that mainstream culture offered his four crazy beautiful kids. We have long bonded over discussions of how to minimize the negative impact of real world Amerikkka on his kids, but this was perhaps the first time we looked at it the other way. He couldn’t come up with anything, he was stumped into silence. And of course then he got upset with me for being ‘negative’ and a downer. Oh well. At least he’s rich enough to pay for their meds and therapies and addictions as they develop.

The curious person that I am, I think I’d still want the aliens to let me in on how things ended up as they are. I’d want to know what they would have predicted say 10,000-15,000 years ago based on what they observed. Or perhaps it was longer ago than that. Whatever. I think it would comfort me to know that it could have been different.

A recurring dream I’ve had in the past is that I go back in time, equipped with modern 20th century weapons to give to the indigenous populations of what we now call North and South America. These dreams are pretty vivid. The natives view these weapons as tools from the Gods to protect their way of life. The invading Europeans are quickly snuffed out before they even set foot on the ‘New Land’. A bloodbath of genocide and ecocide is avoided. The natives are free to continue living as they have for millennia. Strange dream, isn’t it?

I haven’t had that dream in a long time. Does this mean I’ve given up hope?

The White House just did something you’ll likely never see from Stephen Harper’s office: release a YouTube video linking the polar vortex to climate change.

“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues,” Barack Obama’s Science Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, explains.

Aglukkaq began her tenure in the environment portfolio last summer by saying climate change is “debatable.” Meanwhile, Harper effectively fired his National Science Advisor by eliminating the position in 2008.

I blame all of the mess we’re in, in terms of data collection, on U.S. citizens and violations of the Constitution, directly on Gerry Ford for pardoning Nixon. When he pardoned Nixon, what that told every president is that he had a get out of jail free card no matter what he did, and that was the next president. So that meant it could only get worse from there. So I blame that, setting up that condition, on Gerry Ford.

But, I mean, what they’re doing now is a continuation. It didn’t seem to matter what party it is. They’re trying to focus on the whistleblower and not the fact of what they’re doing and the crimes they’re committing.

JAY: And just to pick up on the Ford point, certainly President Obama did that in spades by not going after Cheney and Bush for an illegal war in Iraq, illegal torture, illegal rendition.

BINNEY: That’s correct. Yeah. I mean, he bought into all the programs that they had started.

JAY: Now, you’ve been quoted as saying this NSA data collection is unconstitutional. So that means it’s illegal, which means it’s criminal. So who are you accusing?

BINNEY: Well, it started–the core of this started with Bush, Cheney, Hayden, and Tenet as the central organizers of this effort. And that was kind of kept very confined. They called it a covert program, which meant that they–basically what they wanted to do was to limit knowledge of it by Congress and the courts because they didn’t want any interference in what they were doing.

So in order to do that, the only thing they could do against Congress is to call it a covert program, which meant they could limit knowledge of it in Congress to the Gang of Eight, which meant the ranking and chairs–ranking member and chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committee and the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate. So that made the Gang of Eight.

Peak Civilisation is in the rear view mirror for most humans on the planet. Economies, lifestyles & environment are declining almost everywhere. Overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution & energy decline continue to exacerbate the problems. Available net energy is the determinant of the quality & complexity of civilisation. As the inexpensive, easy to get energy sources decline, disorder in human systems & the biosphere will increase.. Entropy (disorder, randomness) increases. Entropy Wins

The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of
American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a
rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture
–
you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works (Baudrillard 1986, 10)

The consumption of symbolic value has several features that assist it in
maintaining the capitalist order. First, the goods consumed can be inexpensive and made
widely available to the public. Second, the commodity need not have a particularly strong
use value. This means that the object operates on the level of desire or seduction. One
desires or is seduced by the object as possession, not the object as utility. As a result,
symbolic commodities do not interfere with the circulation of use value. In fact, they
circumvent the utility of use value as a force in maintaining political and economic
control over the population (A fact well recognized by both Marx and Baudrillard).
There is another aspect of sign value that distinguishes it from use value. As a
fetish is a commodity whose primary value is symbolic, it requires the construction
of desire. The fetish must be ―sold‖ to the consumer in a way that bread and clothing need not. It requires a cultural industry that is both linked to the material desires of the working class, and to the capitalist system of production, distribution, and consumption.

from Andrew Koch’s essay

we have replaced nature with simulation, this is our world now, this is why hopium is the drug of the masses, the state, modern mass production, it is our religion, our God..

I was just ruminating about the “power elite”, their Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and how they maintain power with their pit-bull multinational corporations. Theirs is truly a power pathology in which any resistance to their goals of usurpation are met with lethal force and sold to the public as a war on “terrorism” or previously “communism”. Any arrangement that leaves property in the hands of small producers, individuals or weak nations is unacceptable. Currently in the U.S. we have a war on small food and milk producers and even producers of seed. Their orchestrations and propagandizing of events to facilitate their amalgamation of markets, resources and power is beyond the pale as are their dog and pony show elections. Ever wonder why third party candidates can never get a foothold and are largely excluded from the media show. John Perkins, the “Economic Hitman” relates many of their activities.

Have you noticed how “Fukushima” news coverage is minimized and practically made illegal in Japan. Watch Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacture of Consent” on Youtube or read this article:

With Big Brother watching over you for the benefit of Big Business, their coup is practically complete. But having relatively well-developed mammalian brains, they lack in the intellectual capacity; most don’t realize they’ve already pulled the trigger on themselves and the bullet is spiraling out of the barrel.

It’s going to be really interesting watching reality change the worldview of so many people – all those economists, “sheeple”, politicians and the like who just go on with their little lives, blithely ignoring it while they watch t.v. and do their jobs. Madness will ensue (whereas we here realize it’s already complete madness living the way we do) in mass quantities – ie. social collapse, religious rebellion (all the platitudes won’t help in the end and no one is going to “save the day”; for the “intelligent” – science and technology won’t help either), and governmental dissolution. The rule of law will mean nothing and you can bet violence will be the norm until enough have been killed off that those left will be wondering what to do next. The old and the very young will probably be affected the most at the beginning. After scavenging as much as they can, the survivors be left high and dry to starve, bake or freeze, in a polluted, over-radiated and disease infested world to live their brutal and short lives with no chance of progeny, no electricity, medical/dental care, and no help available anywhere. No seeds, no food, no fish, no species to eat (except maybe cockroaches and rats) – it should really mess with their heads what exactly they were fighting to survive for. Delaying the inevitable will be the best they can do.

The CFR and associated think-tanks must know that collapse must happen. They will be most interested in maintaining their privileges and advantages, staying on top, as the pyramid collapses. How? Perhaps a super-nationalism in which citizens are willing sacrifice limb and fortune to fight some hyped nemesis abroad. War bonds? Nothing like getting right to the emotional center to manipulate the citizenry. Al Qaeda was good for Homeland Security, deconstruction of the Constitution, a massive build-up of the military and police with plenty of $600 wrenches and $1,000 toilet seats, but it will take a much more daunting adversary to suck the remaining wealth from the populace into the designated corporations. Perhaps war between China and Japan/America. Just imagine the wealth pumped into the banking and corporate coffers of all nations involved, the massive population and infrastructure reduction, instant contraction. Then imagine the limp and impoverished populations buying into a “New World Order” where national identities are erased, all opposition is eliminated, and a system of sustainable slavery and control is put in place with the usual suspects in power. The motto printed on the new world currency will be “Just Be Glad You’re Alive”, and “We’re Looking Out For You”.

I’m telling you, this is huge. We now have well esteemed public figures and journalists telling us that global warming is a complete farce, and, on the other side, smart, well liked journalists telling us all humanity and most of life on earth as we know it will be extinct in the lifetimes of people living today.
And most people, confused by such extreme differences in views of people they believe to be experts, end up confused and generally ignore it all.
That means nothing will be accomplished as far as meaningful policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory#Coping_with_black_swan_events This is the flip side of the Butterfly Effect: the unexpected possibility. While Australia is in for a further bout of heat wave, for the whole continent, the ship that was stuck in Antarctic ice was the victim of a change in the wind. Debris from glacial melt was blown through the polynia, where it froze. Meanwhile, melting glaciers add fresh water to the oceans, which disturbs the Thermohaline Circulation, that then gives us offset Polar Vortices, along with Cyclones and the like. Methinks that the Global Pollution System will be shut down by natural causes within two decades. Are you ready?

In recent months we have endured incredible tropical-equatorial-like torrential rain events occurring at mid-latitudes across the planet. For example, in North America we experienced intense rainfall in the Banff region of the Rockies from June 19th to 24th and the enormous volume of water moved downhill through the river systems taking out small towns and running into the heart of Calgary where it caused $5.3 billion dollars of infrastructure damage; the largest in Canadian history.

Next, it was Toronto’s turn, with 75 mm of rain falling from 5 to 6pm on July 8 (with up to 150 mm overall in some regions) leading to widespread flooding and $1.45 billion dollars in damages. As bad as these events were, they were dwarfed by the intense rainfalls hitting the state of Colorado from Sept 9th to 15th.

Rainfall amounts that would normally fall over 6 months to a year were experienced in less than a week. Widespread flash floods, landslides, and torrents of water ripped apart roads, fracking equipment and pipelines on (at least) hundreds of fossil fuel sites (mostly ignored by mainstream media) (http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/19/media-ignores-damaged-oil-and-gas-tanks-colorado-floods). The level of destruction was simply horrifying, as captured by a man with a plane and a camera. But we have no grounds for complaint, since the widespread flooding in central Europe from May 30th to June 6th caused a much larger $22 billion in damages.

So what is happening? Why are we experiencing so many of these severe weather flooding events that are supposed to only occur every 1000 years or so? Will they keep occurring? What city will be hit next? Can the Alberta tar sands be hit by such an event? What would be the implications?

GENEVA—With the implementation of tighter carbon emissions caps and more responsible household energy use, it is not too late to reverse the dire course of global warming, a panel of scientists who know full well that it is far too late and we are all doomed told reporters today. “If we all do our part right now to design and enforce more responsible business and environmental practices, there’s still a good chance we can avoid the calamitous consequences of worldwide climate change,” said climatologist Dr. Kevin Little, a man who, deep in his heart, knows all too acutely that it’s over, there’s not a damned thing we can do, and so we might as well just start preparing now for what is certain to be the unprecedented destruction of human civilization at the hands of a ravaged ecosystem. “It will take massive investment and cooperation on a global scale, but I’m optimistic we can be in good shape by around 2030 or so.” The researchers who awake each morning with the grim realization that they are bearing witness to mankind’s sad, inevitable endgame also suggested there is still very much a chance of stabilizing the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice.

Not me, TR, because that would not stop the cataclysm, my computer consumes around 40 watts or something, the whole environmental impact of my computer use is minimal, of my whole lifestyle is minimal, down to just enough so I can stay alive and function.

I recognise this is a thought experiment of course. But without the computer I can’t buy food or anything else, there are no shops and I have no car. And I would never hear about the cataclysm or if the experiment had worked.

Here is a wonderful illustration from Monbiot, which I’m sure kevin will enjoy, of how the authorities in power are completely insane and should be confined in cells at the earliest opportunity to protect the public from further harm. Batshit fucking crazy, and yet people vote for them and somehow they weedle they way inot office and get their filthy hands on the levers…

I’ve just finished a report which will be going to certain important people in the district.

A snip.

‘Far from promoting rapid decoupling from fossil fuel use and a rapid transition to sustainable systems that constitute a sane response to the predicament, central, regional and local government continue to promote increased dependence on fossil fuels and increased degradation of the environment. This promotion of increased dependence on fossil fuels comes at the time when fossil fuel net energy has clearly peaked and is in decline, and when climate chaos due to emissions gets worse by the day. Far from applying careful risk management strategies to policy development, bureaucrats routinely disregard all facts that negate the dysfunctional ideology they promote. Indeed, promotion of dysfunctional ideology and get-rich-quick schemes for opportunists has become the ‘unquestioned and unquestionable’ cultural norm for many NPDC officers. Proper analysis reveals that the majority of the policies promoted by local government are imprudent, self-defeating, irrational, omnicidal and ultimately suicidal: the policies are therefore the product of incompetence, insanity or deliberate sabotage.’

Hahaha, yes, incompetence, insanity, or deliberate sabotage… I think a lot of it is just cultural inertia ‘this is what we’ve always done’ because it’s very uncomfortable to have to think a new and very uncomfortable thought…

You know, children like to think their parents love them, or that their teachers are teaching true honest stuff, and adults want to trust leaders, all that stuff, people are often quite simple and naive and easy to manipulate and deceive…

Seems to me there are global networks behind the scenes that have corrupted pretty much everything, so none of geopolitics can be taken at face value anymore, MSM is all propaganda, when a politician makes a statement, it’s in the hope that that will be the ‘reason’ that the public will accept, it’s never the real reason.

I’ve been fooled myself. I should nave learned sooner and faster. Iraq and WMD was such a clear and obvious lesson, but I still fell for the BBC version of Yugoslavia, and the BBC version of Tunisia and Libya and Egypt and Syria… for a while… but not any more.

And since Snowden, the whole thing that I’ve been up against for the last twenty years, while I’ve been trying to do what you’ve been doing, kevin, explaining to people about the climate, etc, and being told I’m a Conspiracy Theorist, is kinda amusing, really… in a very sad, tragic way.

SecularAnimist says:
13 Jan 2014 at 3:31 PM
Nick Gotts wrote: “Actually, a peak of 9 billion around 2050 is by no means out of the question.”

Neither is a crash to one billion, or less, well before 2050.

339
DIOGENES says:
13 Jan 2014 at 4:25 PM
Chuck Hughes #323,

“are we likely to see 3C before mid century?”

Here’s the view of Maslin and Austin, in a Nature editorial of June 2012.

“Dan Rowlands of the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues have run one complex model through thousands of simulations, rather than the handful of runs that can usually be managed with available computing time. Although their average results matched well with IPCC projections, more extreme results, including warming of up to 4°C by 2050, seemed just as likely.”

re the psychology of this stuff, my brother, who is 8 years younger, lives in Australia, havn’t been on speaking terms for a decade or more, he’s far less radical, into capitalism and rightish politics, but he’s also deeply committed to science and has an excellent understanding of climate and weather in fine detail, he was studying how clouds formed when he was a kid, just because it fascinated him and he wanted to know how that stuff worked, he’d write long letters to meteorologists when he was 8, asking questions about how hail stones and snowflakes formed in the high atmosphere and crap like that… he also understands all about the Arctic ice, he’s always been interested in glaciers and that shit too… he’ll be going absolutely XXXXXXXXX about Tony Abbott and what’s happening, because although he never accepted my ‘alarmism’ years ago, he thought the IPCC and Kyoto would sort this shit out…. I TOLD HIM it was dreaming, I fucking told him… he had faith in human nature and the goodness of the authorities and that ‘the grown ups’ would behave like grown ups…. I did not…

I too agree, ulvfugl and Kevin, that the whole system of industrial civilization is seriously gone round the bend.

From the financial sector where they print money out of thin air, to the religious nonsense that reinforces comforting but plainly wrong messages that some “savior” will arrive just in time to make it all okay (so don’t worry, be happy), to the climate people who insist that we’re just living through a temporary phase (yeah, but on the way down and out), and the government that’s only trying to do the bidding of the vested interest groups, the insanely wealthy and “corporate world,” all the way down to the vast majority of individuals who are completely oblivious to reality because the whole system keeps them distracted and only interested in their little life. It won’t change because it CAN’T – there’s no alternative being offered by anyone in a political position. All they know is that they get handsomely rewarded to keep business as usual going along at all costs.

We’re on the verge of world-wide social collapse which will begin when people run out of water (as is happening in China and other nations), food prices become exorbitant (Australia, Europe and the U.S.) and governments continue kicking the (now empty) can down the road. Government reliance on a security state will fall flat when the goons figure out that they’re in the same sinking boat as the “marks” whose heads they’re bashing. I can’t wait to see Wall Street and the seats of political power plundered and burned out, the suits jumping from high places and the rest hunted down by angry mobs of homeless, desperate and armed zombies looking for someone to blame. The corporations will crash and burn similarly, and the wealthy, ostentatious as they are, will be easy to find in their McMansions, which will be overtaken by those same mobs. None of it will help of course, and there will be no place to run and hide since water and climate change affects everyone.

Things may creep along for a short while, being held together with the equivalent of baling wire and rubber bands, but sooner than later we’ll see supply chain disruption, political ineffectiveness, and chaos and violence from people with nothing to lose.

right-o pfgetty: the backing of criminal elements extends up to the highest positions of government. Here’s an example everyone “kinda knew” (especially after the Fast and Furious fiasco), but hadn’t been actually admitted by government until now:

CONFIRMED: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Cartel

An investigation by El Universal has found that between 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an agreement with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organisation to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs in exchange for information on rival cartels.

Sinaloa, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, supplies 80% of the drugs entering the Chicago area and has a presence in cities across the U.S.

There have long been allegations that Guzman, considered the “world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” coordinates with American authorities.

But the El Universal investigation is the first to publish court documents that include corroborating testimony from a DEA agent and a Justice Department official.

The written statements were made to the U.S. District Court in Chicago in relation to the arrest of Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of Sinaloa leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and allegedly the Sinaloa cartel’s “logistics coordinator.”

Here’s what DEA agent Manuel Castanon told the Chicago court:

“On March 17, 2009, I met for approximately 30 minutes in a hotel room in Mexico City with Vincente Zambada-Niebla and two other individuals — DEA agent David Herrod and a cooperating source [Sinaloa lawyer Loya Castro] with whom I had worked since 2005. … I did all of the talking on behalf of DEA.”

A few hours later, Mexican Marines arrested Zambada-Niebla on charges of trafficking more than a billion dollars in cocaine and heroin. Castanon and three other agents then visited Zambada-Niebla in prison, where the Sinaloa officer “reiterated his desire to cooperate.”

El Universal, citing court documents, reports that DEA agents met with high level Sinaloa officials more than 50 times since 2000.

Then-Justice Department prosecutor Patrick Hearn told the Chicago court that, according to DEA special agent Steve Fraga, Castro “provided information leading to a 23 ton cocaine seizure, other seizures related to” various drug trafficking organisations, and that “El Mayo” Zambada wanted his son to cooperate with the U.S.

[it concludes]

After being extradited to Chicago in February 2010, Zambada-Niebla argued that he was also “immune from arrest or prosecution” because he actively provided information to U.S. federal agents.

Zambada-Niebla also alleged that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the cartel in exchange for information used to take down its rivals. (If true, that re-raises the issue regarding what Attorney General Eric Holder’s knew about the gun-running arrangements.)

A Mexican foreign service officer told Stratfor in April 2010 that the U.S. seemed to have sided with the Sinaloa cartel in an attempt to limit the violence in Mexico.

El Universal said that the coordination between the U.S. and Sinaloa peaked between 2006 and 2012, which is when drug cartels consolidated their grip on Mexico. The report ends by saying that it is unclear whether the arrangements continue.

The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ is used to disparage persons who have become aware that groups of powerful people conspire to manipulate markets, to orchestrate social agendas, and to acquire more wealth and power for themselves etc. There is no question that powerful people and organisations do conspire, as has been made clear by the exposure of the rigging of LIBOR rates, amongst many other things. There is, without question, a cartel of powerful bankers and capitalists who conspire to set the agendas of governments, and to profit from those agendas. As has been pointed out many times, especially recently, the problem with ‘conspiracy theories’ is that so many of them have proven to be correct.

We know that in the late 1930s and early 1940s a group of [mostly] men conspired to move the Jews of Europe to slave labour camps and death camps in remote locations, and to keep the activities of those slave and death camps as secret as possible. We know that eye witnesses who first reported to the outside world what was happening in the deaths camps were not believed.

The parallels with the 1940s are chilling: metaphorically, the populace is being ‘herded into wagons that will deliver them to death camps’ and they are totally unaware; indeed many are ‘clamouring to get aboard’, thinking they are ‘going on holiday’. Future ghettos of poverty and starvation are being created by city planners all over New Zealand (and in other countries, of course). And in the process the very habitability of the Earth is being compromised.

Arguments that things are worse elsewhere in NZ or in other places around the world do not impress. Arguments that Taranaki is ‘like no other’ (though partially true) do not impress. Global climate chaos respects no artificial boundaries. Global mayhem respects no arbitrarily drawn lines on maps.

We know that ‘old money families’ such as Rothschild, Warburg, and Rockefeller etc. control most of the western world, and that they are well aware of Peak Oil, Climate Change and the unsustainable nature of the financial system. We know that in the past they have manipulated interest rates, exchange rates, commodity prices and credit availability, and have profited from both economic expansion and economic contraction, and from wars. We do not know the plans they may have for western societies when present economic arrangements reach the point of serious collapse. The increased level of spying on private citizens, the increased powers given to ‘security forces’, the ‘shredding’ of the US Constitution by the Bush and Obama administrations, and the increasing criminalisation of dissent throughout the world are clear warnings where things are headed and what to expect as the collapse unfolds under the present power structure.

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]

Australia is experiencing a rapid energy transition & is on track to reach 100% renewable energy by 2032 at approximately zero net cost! Most of the developing countries in sunbelt can follow this path too & avoid the damage to the earth's climate.

Stomach Of Dead Whale Contained 'Nothing But Nonstop Plastic'

Mount Everest: Melting glaciers expose dead bodies. Several studies show that glaciers in the Everest region, as in most parts of the Himalayas, are fast melting and thinning.

US climate policy must protect forests and communities, not the forest industry